When he regained consciousness, he’d been lowered back to the floor. He still refused to answer any questions, so Eagle ordered him to stand on his knees. When after some time Harry still wouldn’t comply, Eagle ordered him to spread gravel on the floor and then kneel on the tiny rocks. Once Harry had done so, Eagle left. After three hours, Harry’s kneecaps showed through his broken, bloody skin. By then, thirst had replaced pain as his worst tormentor. Sweat had soaked his flight suit and drained his body of its fluids; he desperately wanted water, and he called for a guard. Pigeye returned. He looked over his victim, ignoring Harry’s cries for water. He waited for the American’s total surrender. Twenty minutes later, he had it. “I submit,” Harry rasped.
Pigeye called for the interrogators. They returned but didn’t release Harry from the torturous ropes. As he writhed in pain, they asked him—again—about his father’s occupation. He finally gave more than the Big Four. He said, honestly, “My father grows flowers.”
“Everybody grows flowers,” they said, not believing him.
Hurt, broken, and now irritated, Harry decided to lie. He said his father ran a farm.
On the second page of a large handwritten ledger, sixteen rows and twenty-two columns to a page, the interrogators dutifully recorded “farmer” as his father’s occupation. The name Everett Alvarez Jr.—the first U.S. airman to arrive at Hỏa Lò—anchored the first row of the first page of the ledger. Robert Harper Shumaker, the second American captured, appeared in the second row. So the rows continued, listing U.S. servicemen in order of their arrival at the Hanoi Hilton. The staff also assigned each prisoner a Vietnamese name; Harry became Dư. The columns of each page listed the biographical information that the Enemy Proselytizing Department expected the interrogators to obtain: full name, date of birth, home state, ethnicity, education, service number, branch of service, rank, squadron, ship or base, spouse, spouse’s maiden name, spouse’s address, father, mother, father’s occupation, parents’ address, and condition upon capture. The ledger would contain few blank spaces. Under torture, even the strongest could not hold out forever.
For six days, the guards perpetuated the cycle of questions, torture, and answers. Each time, Harry would reach a point where he would do anything—anything—to escape the pain. Then he’d give as little information as he could and try to recoup his strength for the next round. He could never beat the ropes. In his own view, Harry had repeatedly broken the Code of Conduct he’d sworn to uphold and loathed himself for it. He felt certain that everyone else had resisted.
When the interrogators were finished with him, they threw the shamed aviator into a dingy cellblock in another section of the prison. Harry lay there wondering about the God his mother had promised would always protect him. He’d seen no sign of the Lord’s grace; God had not made his presence known. Harry began to wonder if God really existed. With that despairing thought, he fell asleep.
* * *
That same evening of November 29, 1965, found Jim Stockdale lying beneath a mosquito net on a 27-inch-wide concrete slab above the dirtiest cell floor he’d ever seen. His 6-by-8-foot cell was one of eight in Heartbreak Hotel, the low one-story edifice across the courtyard from the main gate of the Hanoi Hilton. Heartbreak had become a regular first stop for new POWs, and it typically had the effect its name suggested. A walking space only 22 inches wide separated the two sleeping slabs in each cell, but nobody in Heartbreak had a roommate, as the Camp Authority still aspired to isolate POWs. Leg stocks taunted Jim from the end of his bunk. He watched assorted vermin passing through a small drain to the gutter outside. His latrine bucket sat near the drain, and since the cell had a metal feeding chute near the door, he surmised guards could keep inmates locked inside their cells indefinitely. Equally demoralizing, a sheet listing the camp regulations antagonized him from the inside of the cell’s door.
“The criminals are under an obligation to give full and clear written or oral answers to all questions raised by the camp authorities,” it read. “All attempts and tricks intended to evade answering further questions and acts directed to opposition by refusing to answer any questions will be considered manifestations of obstinacy and antagonism which deserves strict punishment.” The typed regulations went on, criminalizing refusals to bow or stand at attention when a guard or officer entered a prisoner’s room; the North Vietnamese almost never used the term “cell.” They also forbade any communication among the prisoners—“criminals,” in their parlance. They offered special incentives to anyone willing to turn in violators.
Above the door and its regulations, each cell had a barred transom through which inmates could communicate when guards weren’t present. Unfortunately, the transoms also allowed the stench of the eighth cell to pervade each room. Jim remembered his first visit to Cell Eight, just after arriving in Heartbreak. A guard he’d nicknamed Dipshit had flung open Jim’s door and yelled in Vietnamese, pointing to Jim’s bucket, bar of soap, and wash rag. Then he pointed at the hallway. Jim collected the rag and soap, put his crutches under his shoulders, and grabbed the pail, which still contained a previous occupant’s waste. He made his way into the hallway and was directed toward Cell Eight. On his way, he spied a grinning American face peering down from above a door. The lift Jim’s spirits gained from seeing that smile disappeared when he saw the makeshift bathroom into which Dipshit pushed him. Cell Eight looked just like his own cell except that it had a water pipe opposite the door, and it reeked of excrement. Jim nearly slipped on the floor and recoiled when he realized a glaze of filth and urine covered it; guards often used the room as a latrine. He emptied his bucket in the room’s drain and undressed. “Syb, you would hardly know me now,” he thought, looking at his thin, dirty body. Who would have thought all this could happen? He began shivering and chose to forgo the drizzle of cold water coming from the pipe. On the wall, one POW had scratched “Smile, you’re on ‘Candid Camera.’” At the least, Cell Eight did give new captives their first taste of the humor that would help them cope with their situation.
That night of November 29, when Harry Jenkins arrived in Heartbreak, Jim heard guards drag the new prisoner through the corridor and shut him in one of the four padlocked cells across the hallway. When the guards left, Jim called through the transom to the new inmate. He heard no response and went to sleep. He’d try to learn the man’s identity in the morning. Hours later, Jim woke up; the new guy snored like a bear. Jim realized he had heard that snore just months earlier aboard his ship, the Oriskany, and he knew only one individual who could muster such bunk-rattling noise.
The next morning, the cellblock’s designated lookout, Air Force Captain George McKnight, watched from the crack beneath his door as the guard completed his rounds. When he saw the guard’s feet leave the cellblock, George whistled “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the all-clear signal. The residents of Heartbreak pulled themselves up to their transoms as they were able. “Harry Jenkins,” Jim called out to the new resident. “Jim Stockdale!”
On the Oriskany, Jenkins had served under Stockdale, who had commanded the carrier’s entire air wing. Everyone aboard called Jim “CAG,” an acronym for “Commander, Air Group.” The Navy had redesignated “air groups” as “air wings” in 1963, but “CAG” had stuck. Hearing the familiar voice, Harry pulled himself up to his transom. He remembered that Stockdale had been flying one of his squadron’s A-4 Skyhawks when he bailed out over North Vietnam in September. “Oh, hi, CAG!” Harry quipped. “I came up here to see what happened to that plane I loaned you; you never brought it back!”
CAG expected such a crack from his happy-go-lucky squadron commander; Harry’s sense of humor was legendary. He did not expect the grim story Harry told next. Harry shared his tale with the cellblock’s six other residents and learned he had become the first senior officer to experience the Camp Authority’s new torture regime and the rope trick, as POWs began calling Pigeye’s trademark device. The Enemy Proselytizing Department apparently had come under pressure to produce m
ore statements for North Vietnam’s propaganda campaign, and they’d sanctioned the use of alternative means to obtain them. While the prisoners did not know the official reasons behind the new tactics, the experience that Harry described shocked the men in Heartbreak. If the Camp Authority had tortured a senior officer like Harry, would they be next? These aviators, actors usually in control of their roles, found themselves in someone else’s terrifying play.
Harry testified to the torture’s effect and confessed what he’d given up. Silence followed. Then Stockdale spoke up, “Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger.” Nobody had been able to follow the letter of the Code, he said; they could only do their best for as long as possible. A solemn moment passed. Then Harry, a renowned lover of chocolate, cracked a smile and said, “Hey, just think what they could’ve gotten out of me for a Hershey bar!”
* * *
When Howie Rutledge arrived in Heartbreak Hotel several days later, he’d faced an experience in Rooms Eighteen and Nineteen markedly similar to Harry’s. In fact, the thirty-seven-year-old commander’s arrival in Hanoi fell just short of a miracle. Minutes before his capture, he’d shot and killed a villager who’d threatened him with a machete. Incredibly, the North Vietnamese had not executed Howie on the spot. Howie’s reaction came in part from some bravado; he belonged to a circle of old-school aviators simultaneously envied for their skill and disliked for their swagger. He was a fighter pilot’s fighter pilot, and he arrived in Hanoi thinking he had the mettle to withstand whatever the North Vietnamese might bring. His training and bearing didn’t even get him through the first day.
His interrogation began with him sitting buck naked on a stool, parts of his body still caked with dirt and blood, with one leg not entirely in joint. A burly officer calmly asked for his name, rank, service number, and date of birth, all of which he provided. Then the officer asked for his ship and squadron. Howie balked and explained the Geneva Convention.
“You are not a prisoner of war,” the interrogator replied. “Your government has not declared war upon the Vietnamese people. You must answer my questions. You are protected by no international law.”
After Howie had refused several more questions, the officer closed his notebook and leaned toward his prisoner. “Commander Rutledge,” he said, “you are a criminal, guilty of high crimes against the Vietnamese people. If you do not answer my questions, you will be severely punished.”
Guards escorted Howie back to Room Nineteen to reconsider. After thirty minutes, they returned him to Room Eighteen, where the officer repeated his questions, yelling at him when he refused to divulge more than the Big Four. The pattern continued for much of the day, and Howie believed he and his training were winning.
Like most naval aviators, Howie had undergone SERE instruction in Warner Springs, California, or Brunswick, Maine. The escape and evasion techniques he and most aviators learned—how to hide in foliage and survive on berries and small animals—proved of little use in Vietnam since downed aviators often found themselves badly injured and descending into groups of waiting North Vietnamese.
SERE training also included resistance elements, which at first proved helpful as the interrogator harangued Howie. His course had prepared him for this exact situation: foreign officers demanding confessions, personal biographies, and military secrets. He knew to fall back on the Code of Conduct and to make interrogators work for every piece of information. In training, though, the interrogators had limits and Howie knew he’d return home at week’s end. His SERE instructors had also taught him that if he showed an iron will to resist, his captors would spend their time working on softer prisoners. Once their torture program had begun, however, the North Vietnamese went after every American viciously—and for as long as it took.
By evening, the interrogator stopped making idle threats. Howie refused a final battery of questions and found Pigeye waiting for him upon his return to Room Nineteen. The interrogator ordered Howie to the floor, where a guard stomped on his swollen, dislocated leg, forcing it flat onto the smooth concrete. Despite the momentary explosion of pain, Howie was silently thankful to have his leg back in joint. The U.S. military’s meticulously developed resistance training then became irrelevant as Pigeye wrapped Howie with his grimly effective ropes and beat him with bamboo rods. He forced Howie to break the Code of Conduct and answer the interrogator’s fifth question: What was his branch of service? He said United States Navy. The officer asked no further questions, leaving Howie baffled as well as broken. Howie, like Harry Jenkins before him, was dragged into Heartbreak Hotel feeling he had failed his fellow Americans.
Shortly after arriving in his new cell, he heard a voice drift through his transom, asking, “Hey, new guy who just moved in, what’s your name? What ship are you from?”
Revived by the presence of another American, Howie grasped the bars of the transom and pulled himself up. He looked out and saw the faces of other prisoners peering out from above their doors. He might have been momentarily defeated, but he no longer felt alone. He learned the voice he’d heard belonged to Jim Stockdale, who briefed him on the cellblock’s lineup. Then, to his new comrades, Howie whispered his confession. “I feel like a traitor,” he said.
“Welcome to the club,” Harry Jenkins responded from across the hall. The two commanders had never met before, but when Harry learned that Howie was celebrating his birthday the very day Harry got shot down, he began to claim that he’d volunteered to take Howie’s November 13 flight so Howie could sleep off a hangover. He would never stop razzing Howie with the joke, which quickly became legend among the POWs.
As Harry and Howie shared their wrenching stories and as Jim Stockdale and the others listened and forgave, the POWs’ stance toward taking torture began to form. They would share what had happened to them and confess what they had surrendered—that is, how they broke the Code. Then their fellow POWs would forgive them. They would resist as best they could, for as long as they could, but no man could defy the Camp Authority’s new methods indefinitely.
* * *
One day in December, Pigeye opened the door to Jim Stockdale’s cell. He brushed his forearms and tapped his wrists, signaling for Jim to don his gray long-sleeved shirt and dark pants—his quiz suit, as he called it. Once Jim had dressed, Pigeye led him into a rainy Heartbreak courtyard and toward the main gate. Jim followed on crude crutches, still healing from three operations North Vietnamese doctors had performed on his knee—all unsuccessful as far as he could tell. While his leg remained stiff and grotesque, his left shoulder had been healing slowly. Before he reached the main gate or New Guy Village, Pigeye ushered the battered aviator into a room off the courtyard. A small lamp lit the room, numbered “24.” At a table sat a young English-speaking officer with prominent ears: Rabbit. In the shadows, Jim spied a senior officer of his own age. Jim bowed to them as required and sat on a stool placed before the table. Rabbit began asking innocuous questions about Jim’s health, food, and clothing. In response, Jim protested North Vietnam’s violation of the Geneva Convention and griped about his accommodations, diet of watery pumpkin soup, and nagging injuries. His attitude roused the senior man, who moved toward the table and began lecturing in Vietnamese. Rabbit translated.
“You have no right to protest. You are a criminal and not entitled to Geneva Convention privileges,” he said evenly. “It is true that my country acceded to the Geneva Convention of 1949, but we later filed an exception against those captured in wars of aggression. You are nothing but a common criminal, guilty of bombing schools, churches, and pagodas, crimes against humanity.”
Indicating Jim’s injured left leg, he said, “You have medical problems and you have political problems, and in this country, we take care of the medical problems only after the political problems are resolved.”
When he’d finished his diatribe, the senior officer left, and Rabbit told Jim he’d just upset an influential member of the general staff, a man Jim would soon know as Cat.
Later that month
, an air force lieutenant colonel named Robinson “Robbie” Risner moved into Heartbreak Cell Two, next to Jim. An ace in the Korean War, Risner had been shot down on September 16, seven days after Jim, and replaced him as the ranking American; Risner had received his officer’s commission shortly before Jim. He was returning from a camp outside the Hilton, known as the Zoo, where he’d learned the tap code that had been developed in Room Nineteen months before and had been spreading ever since. Whispering through the transom when guards weren’t present, Risner taught it to Jim. The two men practiced tapping on their shared wall, each pressing his ear to his drinking cup to amplify the other’s taps. As Jim’s skill improved, he began “buying a word,” as he called it, by tapping twice when he’d guessed the word being sent; Risner would then move on to the next word. If he realized that he’d guessed wrong, Jim would send three quick taps—the error signal—and Risner would back up and repeat the word. Practice soon became genuine conversation, which turned to the most pressing question on every POW’s mind.
“When do you think we’ll go home?” Jim tapped, abbreviating his transmission as “WN DO U TK WE GO HOME” to speed the process.
That winter, Risner tapped back an answer on which most POWs agreed: “This spring.”
Not everyone in Heartbreak picked up the code as readily as CAG. George McKnight was having trouble grasping what his neighbor tapped through the wall. His exasperated instructor finally risked punishment and just yelled the instructions. “You idiot! Tap the row then the column! It’s a five-by-five alphabet matrix, and use C for K!” After that, George became quite adept.
Defiant: The POWs Who Endured Vietnam's Most Infamous Prison, the Women Who Fought for Them, and the One Who Never Returned Page 7